David Foster Wallace Dead at 46

By Ted Burke

David Foster Wallace wasn't my favorite writer, and I didn't quite "get" the metastatic comedy that was the central work in his short list of books, Infinite Jest, but I did read him often and closely enough in other novels, essays, short stories to see genius, real genius, perhaps the stand alone talent of his generation.He was extremely wordy, prolix was his stock-in-trade, but you kept reading him because he was also brilliantly funny; in this sense Wallace was a true heir of to the late William Gaddis, another genius of long , satirical novels like The Recognitions and JR. Writers like these two are that rare combination of intellectual rigor and approachability; their shared virtuosity was in service to humor, a lessening of the thick clutter that gathers in our waking lives.


At his best, David Foster Wallace is an astute chronicler of the often needless (and fruitless) complications characters create for themselves. In the eight stories that make up his collection Oblivion, he outlineed absurdity, sadness, and sheer comic reality of the outer-edge of consciousness. Fashion magazine editorial boards, consumer research companies, and paranoid office situations are among the areas fictionally explored where human activity fractures into dozens of frantic, nervous tangents. Oblivion is a dizzying, daring set of tales - a riveting virtuoso performance. What was unique about Wallace was that his refusal to be conclusive in his writing, in the sense that a subject ends or a story ends and is finished with when he stops writing. As with a mind that engages life not as framework containing an easily explained and grasped beginning, middle, and end, his prose didn't build to a point to be made, an effect to be had, nor did it perform the artificial dialectic of having it's dualisms come into conflict and produce some unexpected new thing.

Wallace's virtuosity and brilliance at undermining a reader's expectations didn't always justify the lengths he went to in order to set up scenes and digressions.
Much of what could have been knock out prose simply goes limp at length. There's a numbing lack of emphasis in Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System that reveals what one would call undigested research. The encyclopedism is a habit he gained from Pynchon and DeLillo, I think, but both those writers have a since of scale, and a style that reins in the excess: their sense what makes an antic sprawl is better served by their respective senses of proportion, developed, I think, under the the tutelage and blue pencil of editors who were not afraid to hack away what does not work and instruct in the mending of what does.

Wallace has no such sense of scale, and remains a promising talent; he was less a wunderkind than bright chatterbox who, not finding the right words for an idea, uses all of them. This seems to be the case when first experiencing his prose, and one does discern a method, a purpose and a heart that goes with his profusion --he as much as any writer tested the limits to which writing could embrace it's contradictions and ambivalence as the a counter thesis was instantly presented any discriptive/perscriptive remarks he might offer. He was a "systems novelist" like Pynchon, DeLillo and the late William Gaddis, but Wallace's system who nooks and crevices he inspected, invaded and described in mesmerizingly, excrutiating detail was language itself. His prose seemed the equivilent of actual speech, full of stutters, doubling back, purposeful self-contradiction. Indeed, prose and the sentences that mark length was an extension of a mind that will not settled in place; his point was the refusal to have a point. Life was too important to have a meaning behind it all; that, he thought, would be conclusive and spoil all the joy and strange tastes of sadness that come our way between dawn and dusk.




The fiction didn't have a pretense of fulfilling a grand narrative; rather, these were mini narratives we traveled through, formations of the society and the habits of its characters revealed who are at once loosely connected with everything else in the area and yet so close in proximity. His writing was a record of continual process, full of unveilings, small voiced declarations, competing manifestos of how to change the way things are. Whatever DFW comes to be called years from now, he was a perhaps the first post modernist writer to understand irony as it's lived, not applied as a card trick. He was a master, and he will be missed.

Ironic, yes, that Wallace's exhausting "maximalist" style, which seems dedicated to fitting everything in sight into a sentence that contains everything else, works best in his shorter pieces: the humor hits harder, the stretches of associations don't have time to die on the vine.
Wallace could make sentences seem like it were a sentient being with lives and curiosities of their own, touching everything their looping syntax and serpentine rhythms could circle their clauses around, and rarely loose the central premise that commenced the writing to begin with; his writing was something akin to a Keith Jarrett piano improvisation where theme and variation became such fully and forcefully units of energy and execution that they soon became full developed bits of art on their own, with their own terms.

American writing has lost a champion.

Snowed in

By Ted Burke

We brought the dog home in the trunk.

All the way from school Dad said she was
back there, feet on the same red carpet as mine.

And so Laura Polley's sad little verse "Winter Accident" opens, promisingly, intriguingly, with a couple of declarative sentences that efficiently, even a bit brutishly set in the scene, a dead dog in the trunk, a little girl on a car seat, a father reassuring her in ways none too convincing. Apprehension is the tone here, and the reader is intrigued by the situation; how did this car ride get to be so extraordinarily weird. There's enough here to make you want to read more and find out what this strangeness is all about. James M. Cain couldn't have done better.But the third line blows the game:

The February sun made me feel like a thief.

This wouldn't have been the place to use a simile, and if the use of a simile were imperative, I might not have used to describe the first person narrator but instead some other detail of this world. The intention here is to sort through a sequence of recollections that are fragmented and partial, vivid in fleet imagery, powerful in the emotional sucker punch they provide, elusive to context and details, but Polley gets ahead of herself and turns this poem into murk, almost a wallow. A bit more distance from the narrative line and a smart gathering of images that could furnish a definitive mood of ambivalence --the sense that the young girl doesn't know how to react to a sort of situation she's not yet had to deal with--could be established by implication, not direction. This is where the poem evaporates entirely, becoming an untidy set of bound clippings from some one's streaming introspection. There details, of course, precise bits that convince us that someone once walked through his house, rode in that car, cared for the dead dog

You're not part of this memory. Your figure is missing
from the strange gray half-light of the closed garage
where he tried but couldn't shut her eyes, Siberian blue,
where we stood, two blunderers, not knowing what to do
with the clumps of dead fur coming off in our hands.

But it seems stilted at best; Polley feels the need to prep us for the emotional subtext of her stanzas and neglects to connect the sequence with anchoring tropes that would make the elliptical style a more interesting thing to parse. The central theme is estrangement , I think, and that is not interesting in itself; there is simply not enough here to bother with. The poem, in brief, is a mess; interpreting it what she might have meant while writing it , for me, is tantamount to letting off her obligation as a writer and finishing the poem for her. It's a cheat.

9/11

By Ted Burke

Here it is, the day that changed everything, the anniversary of the worst thing that could happen, the day when every bad thing we feared came to fruition, and now, eight years after the horrible attack of September 11, 2001, we as a country are up to our necks as the consequences of Bad Faith undermine our spirit, our credibility, our greatness as a Nation. Ensconced in two wars, unemployment exceeding 6 percent nationally, home foreclosures going through the roof, health care out of reach of increasing numbers of Americans , and bin Ladin still not captured, still breathing in some cave plotting more attacks on the Nation.

Things have not gone especially well for us as a people who habitually prefer to think of themselves as a country that can do the right thing and lead by the best example it can set. We are, though, being subject to the tyranny of fear tactics set forth by the GOP during election periods that would have the electorate compliantly relinquish further civil liberties for fear of another terrorist attack while policies favoring unhinged corporate expansion are set in place; the goal, I suppose, is to have John McCain gain the White House with his Creationist, gun- toting running mate and initiate the permanent marginalization of the American People. Sad to say, but we have, as a collective, been swayed to vote against what you'd think were our obvious interests. 9/11 has become a rhetorical ploy to convince voters that this is no time to worry about constitutionally assured rights to life, liberty, happiness; the terrorists are coming to get us. One admires Keith Olbermann's remarks on the GOP's obscene usurpation of the anniversary as a means to gain power.

What should be a time for us all to drop our political acts and come together to not just mourn but to recommit to values and principles that make America honestly great is now an excuse for the party of Tired White Men to pull every fire alarm in the communities we live in; their displays of splintered patriotism and sluggish symbolism resembles the worst performance art piece one could witness, but without even the benefit of an explanatory irony. It might be sugggested that this is the death rattle of a party that no longer has relevance, but what I'm afraid of is that the GOP might take the rest of us down into their grave with them.

Circular Modernism

By Ted Burke
Ron Rosenbaum of Slate has an interesting piece this week called “In Praise of Praise of the Praise of Poetry”, in which he offers a sarcastic tone for the those poets who’s blurbs for other poets sound better than the work they are ostensibly lauding. He means it in a bemused fashion, and declares with a half-sober voice that perhaps this is a literary genre in itself, newly emerging, to be taken on its own terms. Rosenbaum means to be ironic, but he does touch on a point that many readers, myself among them, are at times confounded by lines that are either too abstract and distanced to attempt to enter , or the reverse, too inane, obvious and , honestly, pretentious an imbelcilic to bother wasting another lost minute reading, so we go for our big guns and produce alot of steam to talk around a particular poet's work. There is something artful in the way one learns to cram a string of reworked buzz phrases into sentences have a true elegance; what this really is, I think, is the blurbist following up on his own thinking who is using the nominal praise of another poet as a dry run for perhaps a longer, self-indentifying manifesto they might be readying for that mythological creature, the poetry audience. In some odd fashion we have parallel text going past one another , trains whose contents share nothing but a brief stretch of land where the tracks are laid.

It had been remarked that one of the purposes of the deconstructive method was to banish binary oppositions and the requirements that some forms of text production, ie writing, are subservient to another, with the particular (and vested) interested in elevating criticism to the same level as the literary text it elucidates. Intertextuality has looped an octopus arm around another pillar of conventional thinking. e now have a new form, circular--modernism. It's been ba.d enough that we've had to suffer a generation of dull poets writing poems about poetry (PAP) where the subject seems to be either the poet as sensitive being channeling the variety of vibes that the rest of us cannot discern, or the inability of poetry to "get" at the exactness of the moment. These folks are quiet, reflective, with not a thing to say other than they like the sounds words make when there aren’t any ideas percolating.

Now we have writing in praise of writing about poetry. There is a good amount of log rolling here, with more than a clutch of poets intent on not giving away the game on which careers and reputations are built on, but one does admire the adroit skill that gets applied to the least interesting of the least tangible . What is even more interesting is that a good amount of the essays exclaiming the value of these poets under nominal review don't actually explain how the poets are successful at their tasks; more often we get an examination as to the poet's intention, and then a long run in eloquence describing results that I , for one, witness too little.

I ought not generalize too much poets remarking on the work of other poets, since there is a difference between actual criticism-- evaluation based on close inspection--and the sort of careerist suck-upping one finds on the back of new books. There is the idea that some wag had put forwarded about poets who put forth their own theories about they and their associates do; the theory is more interesting than the poetry it discusses. It is, often enough, more poetic, in the sense that one is prompted to read the theory again, relish the fascinating phrases and decided defamiliarizations and attempt on their own to assemble points the writers are going for. Writing that provokes someone to cogitate cannot be called wholly unsuccesful.

Gary Soto's train of thought

I take trains from time to time from San Diego to San Francisco, stopping between stations to breathe different air and to have a separate state's sunshine on my skin. You go on with the journey, studying the passing terrain from your seat, making a note of ordinary things that seem extraordinary if only because you're passing through. You wonder about it all as the towns, the old farm machinery, the faded barn sides, and dilapidated factories scoot past your invasive gaze: who lives here? I like this poem because Soto appreciates the wandering and the wondering about people and things in their places.

Who Will Know Us? by Gary Soto (for Jaroslav Seifert) It is cold, bitter as a penny. I'm on a train, rocking toward the cemetery To visit the dead who now Breathe through the grass, through me, Through relatives who will come And ask, Where are you? Cold. The train with its cargo Of icy coal, the conductor With his loose buttons like heads of crucified saints, His mad puncher biting zeros through tickets. The window that looks onto its slate of old snow. Cows. The barbed fences throat-deep in white. Farm houses dark, one wagon With a shivering horse. This is my country, white with no words, House of silence, horse that won't budge To cast a new shadow. Fence posts That are the people, spotted cows the machinery That feed Officials. I have nothing Good to say. I love Paris And write, "Long Live Paris!" I love Athens and write, "The great book is still in her lap." Bats have intrigued me, The pink vein in a lilac. I've longed to open an umbrella In an English rain, smoke And not give myself away, Drink and call a friend across the room, Stomp my feet at the smallest joke. But this is my country. I walk a lot, sleep. I eat in my room, read in my room, And make up women in my head — Nostalgia, the cigarette lighter from before the war, Beauty, tears that flow inward to feed its roots. The train. Red coal of evil. We are its passengers, the old and young alike. Who will know us when we breathe through the grass?

Unfinished thoughts are the point of the poem, and unfinished thoughts, the ones that come in a stream, one after another, with hardly a seam showing between responsive notion to the next, is one of the attractions of train travel. Soto gets this flow rather well, and in some way, he offers us a version of John Ashbery might read like if Ashbery weren't so reticent to provide a location, place in his work.

  Like Ashbery, there is the thing that passes by at a speed that allows one to recognize it and the context it resides in, there is the start of thought processes that might attempt to abstract from the thing seen, but then there is an interruption with the motion, the new thing that passes by the observer's gaze; ideas overlap, bleed into one another, there is a fascinating language forming from textured details and the emotive qualities one quickly draws from them. It is a kind of music one creates for oneself, the contrasts in things, shapes, forms, the striking differences in the qualifiers one quickly deploys to get the detail right. Unlike Ashbery, though, Soto's poem doesn't abandon us at the station, and he provides a graspable sense of melancholy under the intoxication of streaming perception; it's not just "who are these people" but also, for the citizens of the places these tracks pass through (or pass through no longer), it's wondering about who remember them when the last house goes dark. The school no longer teems of a new generation. Poetry is a self-conscious medium. In any case, it's an intense examination of one's responses to what life draws them through; anyway, I don't see Soto as being so self-conscious as to weigh down the poem in self-doubting murk. 

He doesn't once mention the fact that he's a poet, nor ponder poetry's inability to get at the essence of things and situations in themselves. Instead, he's like the rest of us in the trenches, lost in thought, engaged with the meaning of things in ways that catch the drift of perfectly arrived ellipsis. It's a well-turned work, relatively modest in proportion to the issues it flirts with, quite moving as a reminder that beauty, joy, sadness are all things we can experience in a single moment.

Sarah Palin Pales

By Ted Burke

The GOP is working overtime giving John McCain's choice for VP, Sarah Palin, an extreme makeover in the attempt to make the selection seem a sane and rational one,a benefit to Republican prospects everywhere. I think not.

Palin is a blunder because she undercuts McCain's claim that experience matters most when electing a President; this is virtually a gift to Obama surrogates who will use this flip flop as an effective ploy against McCain. They will also make note of how swiftly the GOP has been resurrecting old Icons, ala Teddy Roosevelt, when it became obvious that the "experience" issue wouldn't work for them anymore.

This also goes to the matter of McCain’s judgment versus Obama's. It was a persuasive litany of contrasts on issues during Biden's and Obama's speeches, sure fire talking points that will give potent bullets to the Obama campaign during the race to come. Add to this the fact that the selection of a Vice President is, principally, not to deliver sectors of the voter population to a candidate but to have a qualified person ready to step in and become President should something happen to the elected Chief of State. Biden's experience is beyond reproach no matter how one wants to attack it, and it's clear that Obama vetted his choice to assure the country of having someone in place that far exceeds any criteria for competence. Palin's thin resume would do well for a local politician, but in the matters of national and international affairs, she would be no one's first choice to take up an office whose chief responsibility is to be sworn in and become President should the unthinkable happen. McCain's cynicism shows here in gross proportions; Palin satisfies the hard right of his party. Say what you will, but Obama can make the argument that he served the public interest by his careful review of his potential choices, and that Biden was the best person for the job based on his experience and demonstrated expertise on a variety of issues that would concern the President.

The Palin selection also makes McCain's age an issue as well; he is a 72 year old man who has had several bouts with cancer, an inconvenient fact that makes him susceptible to other issues of getting older. One does not relish the thought of having this man elected; should some incapacitating fate befall him ,we'd would quite literally have the least qualified VP in American History stepping up to the plate. Obama at least has shown a sure and subtle grasp of issues over the past two grueling years; we have a definite idea that he knows what he's talking about. Palin, a governor of a state that hasn't the total population to fill a typical moderate size midwestern city, is an unknown quality who isn't likely to convince voters that she's up to the task of stepping up to the calling.

"Walking in Fog" by Barry Goldensohn

By Ted Burke

Fog has its appeal because we’re interested in the idea of a nether world coexistent with our own, where things are less definite, less material, able to appear and vanish into other details , or into vapor altogether. It’s a filter over the hard edges of what we see and take for granted and perhaps even curse for being solid, precisely drawn, an arrangement of three dimensional things we have to walk around, not through.


Walking in the fog, through the woods is what Barry Goldensohn fancies with his poem “Walking In Fog”, a jaunt that has one feeling that one is walking through unforgiving barriers, penetrating unseen membranes.

There’s that twilight , near dark feeling of the world one knows becoming vaporous and and translucent, less fixed on names and definitions that are written down and conveyed by way of essay and routinely complicated system-making, and which seem more as ideas in themselves, the notion of things that hover over our straight forward lives whispering subdued captions of what our lives and our contexts are like free our fear of not having enough or losing what we have.

Goldensohn’s trek through the forest,through the signifying fields, has something in common with the dyes of a madras shirt; everything ,from detail to the slightest glimmer of joy or foreboding trilling lightly at the delicate edge of the paradigm, it all bleeds together.

Everything looms at me. Hound's-tongue
with wet doggy leaves and blue flowers
starts up from the mist-streaked hillside.
Standing by itself, framed in fog
the live oak twists black arms above me,
an embrace, free of the crown of leaves that hides
the outlines of limbs in the crowded background view.
The canyon and the next hill disappear.

.


There is a dream logic at work, not the rational cause and effect a more stainless-steel mind requires, but instead the logic,intuited sense of how elements fit together; Goldensohn has an especially balanced poem here, the physical details veering toward the surreal but never escaping the atmosphere so as the poem is made turgidly weird and overwrought with metaphors that might have sank the poem.

There is , with sincere thanks, a lack of explanation about any of this means, and the power of the poem draws from the way things appear and vanish in this verse, from looming branches and wet leaves; things emerge as one comes closer, things that one has just past vanish into the cottony mist. There is the feeling of being drawn in, embraced by all that one sees; animals and their habitats . I come away with the feeling of being absorbed

Plunging into dense puffs and gusts of fog
along the road a dying friend wheels
and lunges from cliff wall to cliff edge
in a bright yellow blouse and blue jeans
joyous with losing herself and coming back
in daily magic, you see me then you don't.

It comes to death, of course, the fascination with it, the thinking of whether this life is worth the struggle and the pain and the sheer labor just to be current with one’s accounts and relationships, and the thought does arise among many of us, musing at twilight, at dusk or dawn, in fog near the cliffs where the songs of sea maidens and powerful water gods offer their promise of rest and deep, coral toned symphonies, that the transition from this life, the hard life, the life where everything has density and measurable weight, to the life where gravity takes no toll , would be simple, ease, painless, natural beyond nature. The final image of the dying friend wheeling herself to the cliff edge, decked out in a bright blouse as she considers going over the edge and then returns from the fog, as if by magic, caught me by surprise, it stopped me, it fairly stunned me.

Writers, the sort we like to discuss, the introspective and the thoughtful and the perennially worried, are most comfortable on the smooth, stainless steel surface of given meaning, but they (we?) are cursed (blessed?) with the impulse of analysing where they stand, why, and how it might be otherwise if there rules of gravity weren't an imperative.

The speaker here is someone noticing how things familiar and commonplace appear to be at once ethereal and somewhat supernatural given the change in atmosphere, light; the density of things gives way to diffusion and there is the feeling that you're walking through the material world and travelling great distances in no time at all when you stroll through the forests; our narrator observes what things appear as, notes the change in a personal psychology, the rise of feelings that have to explicable basis, but never gives way to the seduction of his mood.

He is firmly rooted, and wonder as he might about another plain his language is inadequate to describe, he remains on the soil he landed at birth. He has much he wants to do, and hasn't the hankering to consider other options; the wheelchaired friend, though, has the luxury to wonder, to play games as described, coming so close to a mystical abyss only to back away from it's yawning gasp. Giddiness is the mood, finally, the thrill of having trekked alongside certain fatality only to walk away from it, if only by mere inches. It is one of the benefits of not taking the Leap, the reminder that one is alive without doubt when every sense is going off like fire alarms.


The fog, with what its qualities suggest about being a portal to some greater realm above our own, is something we journey through, absorbing the associations, daring to think of a life free of the dreariness of making a living and keeping your word and thinking perhaps further that passing on would be so bad, and then coming back, an aberration in the mist, slightly crazed, energized, fresh from the fox hole, ready to shoulder the weight of the world one was birthed into, realizing there are still some things one would like to attempt before presenting a boarding pass.